Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The greatest artists know how to entertain, or else nobody would read them.
I was never a lonely child who sat looking at the rain sliding down the window.
Everything will be alright in the end so if it is not alright it is not the end.
I've had a very lucky life because I'm of this generation where everything was possible.
I'd like to be a jazz singer, but I couldn't possibly do it; nobody would want me, anyway.
I'm always running my mouth off and getting myself in trouble, so I'm trying to do it less.
Men take much more notice of older women in France, so I might move there. I think I'm a good bet.
If people want to take their lives and are helped to do so, the punishment is tragic for all concerned.
I wanted to be a landscape architect, but I trained as a teacher; I worked in publishing; I was a waitress.
The only real failure is the failure to try, and the measure of success is how we cope with disappointment.
You can cycle through London on the side streets, which are less polluted - and much more interesting anyway.
Nothing beats weaving through the rush-hour traffic or whizzing past the eternal gridlock that is the Strand.
I'm mad about gardening. I have an allotment on the other side of Hampstead Heath, and I keep three hens in my garden.
Psych yourself up until you're confident that the world will be interested in what happens to your characters. Confidence is key.
My first novel, 'You Must be Sisters,' was started in Pakistan. I've wrote several novels and a TV drama set or partly-set there.
You keep your past by having sisters. As you get older, they're the only ones who don't get bored if you talk about your memories.
One sees more and more people who are miserable and demented and you feel it would be both kind and wise to leave them a few pills.
You need to know the characters as living, breathing people before you start the plot; otherwise, you'll feel panic, anarchy and chaos.
I like missing someone and being missed; I like looking forward to seeing him again. I like getting emails and texts with lots of xxx's.
Whining writers are a hideous sight; we should really shut up, because we are lucky if we can cobble together a living from all of this.
I've written something like 17 novels, which isn't bad, I suppose, but my father wrote 120 books, my mother 40. In comparison, I'm lazy.
'Tulip Fever' did change my life. It did that thing that sometimes happens when a book takes off - it opened doors on to whole other worlds.
It was very liberating, living in a foreign country, a place where everything was new and strange - the food, the customs, the climate, everything.
I work every day from 9:30 or so until lunchtime. In the afternoons, I become a normal person - go shopping and do the garden and look after my grandchildren.
Cycling is the only way to free ourselves from the misery of the Tube, the wall-to-wall buses that line Oxford Street, the hopelessness of even thinking about driving.
I feel as if someone is going to come along, feel my collar and say: 'Do you really think you can get people to read books you've made up about people that don't exist?'
All novelists I speak to about how they started usually say it was by pulling up their roots and going to live somewhere else. You see the shape of your life at a distance.
I hate fussing about in the kitchen when I have people over to supper, so I make a rich beef stew cooked in wine with carrots, sundried tomato paste and chopped chorizo sausage.
I am a great believer in having the power to end your life and knowing that, in extremis, you can. But I would not want to involve anybody else in my actions if it could imperil them.
Independence is fun, especially when there's a beloved waiting in the wings, and freedom makes you a more interesting person. Having separate lives brings fresh air into a relationship.
Living apart is hardly possible if people have children together. It can also be more expensive to maintain two homes. But then, it's expensive to break up when you live in one property.
Once a character has gelled it's an unmistakable sensation, like an engine starting up within one's body. From then onwards one is driven by this other person, seeing things through their eyes.
I did have a go with Botox, but I couldn't move my eyebrows. I also, at one point, had that filler stuff injected, but I looked like a hamster with wodges of food in its cheeks, so I stopped that.
Whatever you do they will love you; even if they don't love you they are connected to you till you die. You can be boring and tedious with -sisters, whereas you have to put on a good face with friends.
But it's also true that the person who risks nothing, does nothing, has nothing. All we know about the future is that it will be different. But perhaps what we fear is that it will be the same. So we must celebrate the changes.
When I was young, I couldnt imagine women of 60 falling in love. For one thing, people used to stay married; they werent out in the jungle, searching for romance. Besides, these women just looked so ancient - permed hair, beige cardis.
When I was young, I couldn't imagine women of 60 falling in love. For one thing, people used to stay married; they weren't out in the jungle, searching for romance. Besides, these women just looked so ancient - permed hair, beige cardis.
I have a hippopotamus skull next to my bed, called Gregory. When I was six, my three sisters and I clubbed together and paid £4 for it in a junk shop. We collected owl pellets, ostrich eggs and sheep skulls for our natural history museum at home.
Bringing my two children up while writing was just a part of life. I'd much rather have had their interruptions than been stuck in a sterile office. This way, I had welcome distractions. I had to load the washing machine, I had to go out and buy lemons.
My favourite room in my house is easily the top room, which is a bedroom but also a bathroom, with a big, wooden carved bath, two huge fireplaces and a raised bit in the corner for performances. I've had some really lovely parties and poetry readings up there.
I have four Rhode Island Red hens. I get two eggs from them a day. They're feathered dustbins that eat leftover food and weeds, and they're easy to look after - I throw some grain at them in the morning, take the eggs and that's it. I love the sound of clucking.
Don't start writing your novel until you know your characters very, very well. What they'd do if they saw somebody shoplifting. What they were like at school. What shoes they wear. Spend days - weeks, months - being them until they thicken up and start to breathe.
My parents were both writers - they would type their manuscripts sitting side by side on the veranda of our house near Watford - so I wanted to do something different. I wanted to be a bluegrass singer, an architect, a landscape gardener, or to do something with animals.
Writing a novel is a huge adventure; when it's going well it's more fun than fun. When it stutters to a halt put it aside. Go for a swim, go for a walk, take a week off. Don't panic or be afraid; you and your characters are in it together. Trust them to come to your rescue.
Once you start cycling, the city opens up for you. No longer are you fighting it, hot and frustrated; no longer are you at the mercy of bus drivers, roadworks, decisions made by others and over which you have no control. Believe me, once you've tasted this freedom, you're hooked.
My perfect day is to work incredibly well in the morning and write something wonderful, then take the dog for a walk and go for a swim in the ladies' ponds on Hampstead Heath or work in my allotment. Then I get tarted up in the evening and go out in London to dinner or the cinema.
Living together places a huge burden on the other person to be lover, friend, entertainments manager, chef, domestic help, which is almost impossible and can lead to disappointment. If you don't live together, you spend more time with other people and ease the pressure off your lover.
A novel is utterly your own creation, a very private process. I think of a novel as a noun and a screenplay as a verb. In a novel, very little needs to happen; you can explore a person's memories and thoughts and fantasies. In a screenplay, it's all action; you must push the story on.
Discover the times when you're most creative - mornings, nights, afternoons - and clear the time to work then. Many writers find the mornings are best, and the afternoons are only good for editorial corrections, or getting the washing done. Others can only work through the night, drunk.
I found Hollywood pretty bruising and uncreative. The executives are all in thrall to the boss, and spend their times double-guessing him or her, and trying to remember what he/she said and then applying them to the script, whether it was useful or not. They're all in fear for their jobs.